


The Emissary Returns to Tarsus

by NancyBrown



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/M, Gen, Homecoming, Horror, Post-Series, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-10-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 16:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2474426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NancyBrown/pseuds/NancyBrown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sisko comes home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Emissary Returns to Tarsus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KannaOphelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KannaOphelia/gifts).



He comes home.

He is was has always been here, living existing rebecoming, circles and points and Jake and Kasidy and HOME. He is was has been fire and Jennifer and sorrow and he remembers the difference between was and is shall be.

Home.

The Sisko is of Bajor. The Sisko is of the Federation. Benjamin Sisko.

Ben.

Coalescent energy rebuilds him from the atoms upward into cells blood bone skin. Afterthought: clothes. Corporeal form and mental awareness and social taboo. Nudity is optional. Uniform.

Home.

Promenade. Mezzanine. Metal-shelled world bustling with corporeal beings Bajoran Cardassian Klingon Trill Vulcan Ferengi.

Missing.

Corporeal form and organic brain inflict demands and recreate breath, pulse, observation through eyes and ears instead of absorbed via spirit. Ben looks around himself for the first time in a span he has trouble defining as "time." The Prophets made him one with them, non-temporal aliens beyond human comprehension, and he has become more than human to survive. Readjustment to limited human experience will take practice. He will have to remember to walk, to eat, to defecate and speak and think with neurons. Anticipation has made him eager to relearn this with Kasidy's help, and Jake's, and his colleagues who became friends who became family.

But no one is here.

Dust is a function of life. There is no dust, only the finest smell of lingering decay, and sad lumps across the floor of the Promenade which perhaps once were living beings tens of thousands of years ago. The station hums on, its unencumbered power sources no longer breaking down due to demands, and happily providing the mild power needed to provide minimal life support from a source which would run for millions of years.

He will not choke as his breath stole away by vacuum. Should he wish sustenance, the replicators will have more than enough power to provide him meals. Even the communications array, still functional after all this time, will have power enough to send a call out into the stars.

But as the last of his godhood slips away, Benjamin Sisko feels the empty echoes in the galaxy swirling around him, and knows they are all dead, they have all been dead, all the faces he loved and their children and great-grandchildren. The station's data banks will give him the barest words, in a language evolved past that which he knew: worry, mortality, quarantine, too late, pandemic, extinction.

Alone.

Forever.


End file.
